The Empire's New Clothes The
cost of the war in Iraq is almost beyond imagining. But as it comes
into focus, it’s no wonder that the public is turning against it.
This is a bull's-eye of a column by Christopher Dickey of Newsweek:
A
clear head and a calculator will tell you very quickly that the costs
of this conflict in Iraq are on a scale far beyond whatever benefits it
was supposed to bring. If Saddam had been behind 9/11, OK. But he
wasn’t. If he’d really posed a clear and present danger to the United
States with weapons of mass destruction, then the invasion would have
been justifiable. But he didn’t, and it wasn’t. Bringing freedom
and democracy to the Iraqi people is a laudable goal, but not one for
which the administration made any worthwhile preparations—which is why
the occupation has been so ugly, bloody and costly. Tabloids may
amuse their readers with snapshots of Saddam in his skivvies, but it’s
the Bush administration’s threadbare rationales for postmodern
imperialism that have been exposed.
"Some may disagree with my decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power," the president suggested in his weekly radio address last weekend,"but all of us can agree that the world's terrorists have now made Iraq a central front in the war on terror". . . . Our troops are fighting these terrorists in Iraq so you will not have to face them here at home."
Wait a minute. Who disagreed about Saddam?Do you know anybody anywhere, who said, "Hey, the Butcher of Baghdad is a stand-up guy, let’s keep him around"? The problem was always what or who might come after.
What skeptics said was, "Occupying Iraq is a dangerous idea because 1)
it will cost an enormous amount of blood and money, 2) it's an
open-ended commitment that has no defining moment of victory or
scenario for departure and 3) zealous terrorists will thrive there under foreign occupation, then spread anti-American violence far and wide.
. . . If we're safer, it’s largely because the war in Afghanistan and
covert operations in Pakistan managed to round up or kill most of the
key organizers of 9/11 by the spring of 2003. What we’re facing today are new dangers from new terrorists—-and new dangers we are likely to bring on ourselves.
That's exactly it. When Dubya says, "world's terrorists have now made Iraq a central front," etc., he's not giving us a reason to support his policies -- he's admitting that they've failed.
The price of a barrel of crude oil is flirting with $60; a Chinese state-controlled oil company has made an $18.5 billion bid for the American oil firm, Unocal -- ExxonMobil has quietly issued a
report, The Outlook for Energy: A 2030 View, predicting that the moment of "peak oil" is only a five-year hop-skip-and-a-pump away; "Oil Shockwave,"
a "war game" recently conducted by top ex-government officials in
Washington, including two former directors of the CIA, found the United
States "all but powerless to protect the American economy in the face
of a catastrophic disruption of oil markets."
Well, hold your hats, folks. Below Michael Klare, discusses a new bombshell book by oil industry insider Matthew Simmons,
and his unsettling news that everything you've heard about those
inexhaustible supplies of Saudi oil, which are supposed to keep the
world floating for decades, simply isn't so. This is real news and
absorbing its implications is no small matter.
For those oil enthusiasts who believe that petroleum will remain
abundant for decades to come -- among them, the President, the Vice
President, and their many friends in the oil industry -- any talk of an
imminent "peak" in global oil production and an ensuing decline can be
easily countered with a simple mantra: "Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia,
Saudi Arabia." Not only will the Saudis pump extra oil now to alleviate
global shortages, it is claimed, but they will keep pumping more in the
years ahead to quench our insatiable thirst for energy. And when the
kingdom's existing fields run dry, lo, they will begin pumping from
other fields that are just waiting to be exploited.
In a newly-released book, investment banker Matthew R. Simmons
convincingly demonstrates that, far from being capable of increasing
its output, Saudi Arabia is about to face the exhaustion of its giant
fields and, in the relatively near future, will probably experience a
sharp decline in output. "There is only a small probability that Saudi
Arabia will ever deliver the quantities of petroleum that are assigned
to it in all the major forecasts of world oil production and
consumption," he writes in Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy. "
It is not surprising, then, that the Department of Energy and the Saudi
government have been very nervous about the recent expressions of doubt
about the Saudi capacity to boost its future oil output. These doubts
were first aired in a front-page story by Jeff Gerth in the New York Times
on February 25, 2004. Relying, to some degree, on information provided
by Matthew Simmons, Gerth reported that Saudi Arabia's oil fields "are
in decline, prompting industry and government officials to raise
serious questions about whether the kingdom will be able to satisfy the
world's thirst for oil in coming years."
Essentially, Simmons argument boils down to four major points: (1) most
of Saudi Arabia's oil output is generated by a few giant fields, of
which Ghawar -- the world's largest -- is the most prolific; (2) these
giant fields were first developed 40 to 50 years ago, and have since
given up much of their easily-extracted petroleum; (3) to maintain high
levels of production in these fields, the Saudis have come to rely
increasingly on the use of water injection and other secondary recovery
methods to compensate for the drop in natural field pressure; and (4)
as time goes on, the ratio of water to oil in these underground fields
rises to the point where further oil extraction becomes difficult, if
not impossible. To top it all off, there is very little reason to
assume that future Saudi exploration will result in the discovery of
new fields to replace those now in decline.
This being the case, it would be the height of folly to assume that the Saudis are capable of doubling
their petroleum output in the years ahead, as projected by the
Department of Energy. Indeed, it will be a minor miracle if they raise
their output by a million or two barrels per day and sustain that level
for more than a year or so. Eventually, in the not-too-distant future,
Saudi production will begin a sharp decline from which there is no
escape. And when that happens, the world will face an energy crisis of
unprecedented scale.
The moment that Saudi production goes into permanent decline, the Petroleum Age as we know it will draw to a
close.
Oil will still be available on international markets, but not in
the abundance to which we have become accustomed and not at a price
that many of us will be able to afford. Transportation, and everything
it effects -- which is to say, virtually the entire world economy --
will be much, much more costly. The cost of food will also rise, as
modern agriculture relies to an extraordinary extent on petroleum
products for tilling, harvesting, pest protection, processing, and
delivery. Many other products made with petroleum -- paints, plastics,
lubricants, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and so forth -- will also prove
far more costly. Under these circumstances, a global economic
contraction -- with all the individual pain and hardship that would
surely produce -- appears nearly inevitable.
Through his scrupulous research, Simmons has convincingly demonstrated
that -- because all is not well with Saudi Arabia's giant oilfields --
the global energy situation can only go downhill from here. From now
on, those who believe that oil will remain abundant indefinitely are
the ones who must produce irrefutable evidence that Saudi Arabia's
fields are, in fact, capable of achieving higher levels of output.
